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Hit and run yes, but that doesn't explain why Vista still went out the door? Couldn't he have just quit? Couldn't Microsoft said no, it's not ready? I mean this still doesn't explain why Vista was out the door before the code was ready.

It's implied right in the summary. Microsoft didn't want investors to lose confidence in Vista, so they shipped it early to coincide with Valentine's departure. That way it looks like Valentine left because the product was ready rather than leaving because the project was going down the drain.

Think of it this way: What does it say when a coach of a sports team decides to jump ship to another team mid-season?

The big secret is that Vista and Duke Nukem Forever are actually the same
program. The trouble is, people keep trying to get Vista to act like an OS.

This incident has everything: 1) Overpaying executives and underpaying
the people who do the work. He got stock options worth $30 million just for
coming to work the first day? 2) Corporate lies and sneakiness and
manipulation. 3) Absolutely no caring for customers. 4) Behavior that will
eventually sink the company. Remember, at one time IBM had 100% of the PC
business. Remember, IBM lost $1 billion on OS2, and then lost another $1
billion. Even the biggest company cannot treat customers badly forever.

The whole Vista experience oozes sleaziness. It's the true modern
horror story. In comparison, the movie "Aliens" is for schoolchildren. What's
a monster compared to Bill Gates in the role as software's "Dr. Death",
degrading the quality of life of millions of people by hassling them and
costing them more?

One of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting
Windows Vista: Save Windows XP [infoworld.com]. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have
signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched
- many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a
change."

The thing is that he didn't release Vista, just RC1. RC1 isn't the shipping OS. Sounds like someone still at Microsoft is trying to point the blame at someone who left a year before. This isn't Hit and Run, it's Duck and Cover.

In a release candidate, everything is supposed to be locked down. There should not be any code changes only minor corrections such as typographical errors. If you are in RC1 and still adding or rewriting code then you've screwed the pooch.

The thing is that he didn't release Vista, just RC1. RC1 isn't the shipping OS. Sounds like someone still at Microsoft is trying to point the blame at someone who left a year before. This isn't Hit and Run, it's Duck and Cover.

No, this doesn't shift blame from Microsoft at all. That's why they didn't want this to be known.

Release Candidates are supposed to be versions you *think* are worthy to ship, but need to undergo thorough testing to make sure. Any changes that need to be made should be minor.

If he upgraded the project to RC1 status, and the testing showed that it wasn't anywhere near ready for release, then Microsoft could have downgraded it in a jiffy and said more work needed to be done. Or kept it at "RC1" for a long time before making "RC2" which would be the first real Release Candidate.

Instead they ended up pushing it out the door in short order (maybe not RC1 specifically, but only a minor change from it), so as to make it look like the project was indeed almost ready for release and that's why the project leader left. As opposed to this version of events, which looks more like the project wasn't going good and the project leader got a better offer so he jumped ship and left the project to hang.

Well if I was about to be tied to a stinker like Vista, which would stink on ice. (or as George Carlin once said '... could knock a buzzard off a sh#twagon') I would want to salvage some sort of appearance of success as I bailed out of the company and on to millions. As long as the contract is signed at the new job then I don't care how wet the ink is when it all goes to hell. Vista was going to go down so hard it was going to taint everybody who even lived nearby let alone Microsoft. I can't fault the guy

From RC1 to RTM only two months passed, not one year. And the product RTMd about two weeks after he left.
Based on previosu products, RC1 should have been very close to production ready, relatively stable, useable and fast (it was the case with Windows 2000 and XP, at least). With Vista, RC1 apparently barely compiled. It was completely unuseable. RC2 was much better, but still very difficult to use. RTM was what I would have expected for an RC2.
I think the article is right, BV pushed Vista to a) be free to move earlier and b) not have another delay in his resumee.

You can only fault the guy for not finishing his obligations with his current company and choosing to cut and run to make the most money. On the other hand companies (at least in the US) have no loyalty to their employees anymore either. I think bad companies and bad employees and managers deserve one another.

Vista was in development for five years or so and it's still broken a year later. No one can be faulted for a month or two in that time frame. The problem was more in the process itself and all sorts of other executive characters have left the Soft over it. Non free software development, especially Microsoft style development, is broken.

You also have to stop and consider that perhaps he had been waiting a while to leave. I believe that at this point Vista kept getting delayed and moving to the right. He probably had a lot of pressure from MS management to wrap up Vista as well and get it shipping ready or not. At some point he probably had to make the decision to cut their losses and get it out the door. With the ever stretching time frame of the development he probably hung in there longer then he wanted to.

Valleywag ( the first link in TFA ) says "Valentine surely told his bosses of this fact [ that he had signed with Amazon ]." but offers no evidence to back it up. I don't really want to defend Microsoft, and while they are sure guilty of a multitude of sins, they might be innocent of this one.
Lots of people make future employment agreements without telling their current employers. Indeed, in my experience both as employee and employer, the majority do not tell.

Valentine is the guy who led Exchange in the 90s as it took over corporate mail servers and then led the Windows releases of 2K (still my favorite), XP, and apparently Vista. Love or hate the products, he's been in charge of groups who have shipped some big stuff.

He also has a very engaging style of management. Instead of leading from afar he would hold weekly team meetings where he would give everybody the projects status, address concerns, and then kick off the festivities with clips from the weekly world news. The comedy skits he and Ian MacDonald would do were pretty funny most of the time.

He projects the work hard play hard mentality. He always kept the team meetings stocked with several kegs of beer and always told the employees that if they drank too much take a cab home and expense it.

I work in Brian's org at Amazon (and am posting as AC for obvious reasons) -- man, what a loss this was for you guys at Microsoft! Unlike most senior execs I've encountered, he's not afraid to challenge the status quo; on the other hand, he isn't obsessed with changing things for the sake of change (if it works well enough, leave it be). Not afraid to call bullshit when he sees it.

He also runs one of the flattest orgs I've ever been in -- the depth of the tree from intern to Brian is quite shallow. Bringing a problem to his attention is subsequently easy, but you'd better be prepared to defend why it's a problem, why it's solvable, and why you think it's that important.

My friends over at MS say that he really got the shaft over Vista. Sounds about right for the culture -- my read is that failure is penalized heavily there these days. The strategy for succeeding in an environment like that? Office Space.

thank you. really the market has decided his worth. Obviously you and I wouldn't pay that much to hire the guy, but all he needs is 1 company to pay him a crazy salary. And in this case he's found TWO that are willing to pay.

a number of reasons. first, it indemnifies management somewhat to hire a big name with a big salary when something goes wrong. second, a person with a big salary usually has access to industry information that us peons are not normally privy to. third, most of these companies are mental and don't make rational decisions. fourth, because so many companies are mental you have to pay a high price for good people and for bad people and there is no easy way to sort the good and bad.Given that he has released bi

He didn`t do it for the money - he wanted the users to have a modern, lightweight operating system with great features like Aq...Aero, media controlled internet bandwith, and gazillions of bl...features. The system is very mature and st

If he is willing to push an unfinished product to market at a huge loss to his company just so that he can leave his current post for a higher paying one, what is to say he won't simply rinse and repeat. People like this are more a liability than an asset.

I think the point is that Valentine decided to leave, and MS knew that would look bad to investors. So MS pushed Vista out the door to give investors the impression that Valentine was leaving because there was nothing more to do on Vista.

I think you are confusing "RC1" (Release Candidate 1, i.e., the first trial release of Vista, which happened 17 months ago) with "SP1" (Service Pack 1, i.e., the first major overhaul of Vista after its release (which Microsoft is still trying to get out the door, with mixed results).

To help optimize how your Web pages are displayed, we are checking to see if a 2007 Microsoft Office program is installed.

If this page does not automatically redirect, you have scripts disabled. See more information on scripts.

Follow this link if the page is not redirected.

So they need to check whether I have Office installed just so I can see the MS Project page? Interesting... (Win XP Pro + Firefox + NoScript, with JavaScript turned off for microsoft.com, produced the above page.)

Where do I begin?
WinFS was never a filesystem in it's own right. It was a glommed-on database where an integrated SQL Server instance stored one table, and then NTFS stored another - and the data was never very well linked together. Frankly I was disappointed in the WinFS implementation from the very first time someone actually described how it worked. Vista is touch-and-go enough for most consumers without having WinFS - the usability problems WinFS would have brought would not have been worth it as it was. It was cut because it was not ready for prime-time - just as several cool features were in XP, and Windows 2000 before it.

It's vaporware that's resurrected every once and then (ever since the early NT vs. IBM's OS/2 times), designed to make Microsoft look like it has some flashy technology pointy-haired-bosses will not be able to tell it's a Really Bad Idea. And they won't because it will never, ever ship.

what does Oracle use for storage? that depends. when running RAC (Real Application Clusters), we cheaped it out and used OCFS (Oracle Clustered File System), which was pretty close to just using raw devices and writing to them. typically a database doesn't need much more than a wrapper around storage, everything is stored in a proprietary/binary way anyways. a file system is just overhead or the middleman at that point.

WinFS has been the "new great feature" promised in every release since the early 1990s (ie for well over ten years now). Talk is cheap, delivering something that works well is hard, which is why WinFS always gets ripped out.

If one person leaving company X for company Y and it causes causes company X's bread and butter product to suck, it's not company Y's fault. Company X should have invested in business continuity. BCP is boring, but what if instead of being hired away, he was hit by a bus or (arguably similar to the deal he got at Amazon) wins the lottery? A company 1/10th the size of Microsoft shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket.

As I recall, a lot of companies who'd forked over lots of dollars for multi-year support agreements back around 2001 (there was some marketing phrase, I forget what) were starting to grumble that the promised new releases included in the price hadn't yet been released, and the agreements were about to expire.

This is one of the factors that prompted the early release of the "business" version of Vista in late 2006 instead of it being released along with the home version in early 2007.

Not that any businesses really wanted to touch that, but it let Microsoft say they'd lived up to their part of the agreement (in their own inimitable (innovative?) Microsoft way, of course).

The versions licensed via Software Assurance were all available in Q4CY06 - because they are delivered electronically. There is no magic juju that happened in the first three months of 2007 that made Home any different - it was the exact same codebase - only it had been localized, had shiny media made, and been put into retail boxes.

Indeed, the SA agreements that where all coming up for renewal, stated that there would be at least *one* major release of the OS. Failure to ship an OS in the time frame of the SA agreements would have left Microsoft open to major law suites for breach of contract.

Man, if I'm Microsoft and I'm generally willing to break the law to get my way when push comes to shove, I'm probably sending some guys to bust Valentine's kneecaps at a minimum.

Granted, that wouldn't help them out in the short term, but they'd lose less executives if a savage beating was part of the severance package. Hell, they probably could advertise right here on slashdot for people willing to kick a Microsoft executive in the groin for free!

For top notch positions, the yearly salary is just cosmetic. Its not uncommon for high ranked managers and architects to make some silly salary like minimum wadge, but get hundreds over hundreds of thousands in bonus every year. Its a whole different ballbark from the average salaried developer monkey.

For top notch positions, the yearly salary is just cosmetic. Its not uncommon for high ranked managers and architects to make some silly salary like minimum wadge, but get hundreds over hundreds of thousands in bonus every year. Its a whole different ballbark from the average salaried developer monkey.

No, I think like CEOs with far too high compensation packages, it is corporate executive management taking a page from the CEO. Screw the company, just pay me lots of cash.

If M$ has this kind of problems with their executives, perhaps they are more rotten at the core than most people even realize. And Amazon paying $30M to start? Come now, that would hire 300 programmers for a year.

More if the programmers qualified under Amazon's "Get 4 for the price of 3" promotion.

Amazon was just playing catch with a baseball and the ball got away. It hit Microsoft right in the womb. Shortly after Vista said "Calculating File Transfer". Microsoft and doctors thought that Vista might be in trouble so they induced the labor. Then after it was born they found out it was just a "feature". That original file transfer is still "calculating" to this day.

What the article doesn't seem to mention, or remember, is all the bad press Microsoft was getting for having the DNF of Operating Systems. They were getting annual vaporware nominations, and basically looking like a bunch of idiots that couldn't get a product out the door.

There was tremendous pressure from all sides to release Vista. Don't think you can really place the blame on Valentine or Amazon for this one.

I guess delaying for another year and releasing it in better shape would have been a smarter move.

Having worked in the software industry, I know sometimes you have to bite the bullet, ship the product and deal with the fallout. Would it have been better to wait? Maybe. Would the product have been better after another year of development? Maybe not, it's been over a year and they can't get the 1st service pack out.

It's probably a testament to the tenacity of Microsoft that Vista was ever released a

Brian Valentine was known throughout the company as a guy who could take troubled products that were floundering and he could get them shipped. But leadership in Windows is cursed to two releases.

Moshe Dunie pushed out two major versions of NT and floundered with NT5 (Windows 2000) and couldn't integrate 9x. Valentine came in, got the organization in order, and Windows 2000 was a success. He kept it up to merge the organization and features from Win9x, and miraculously got XP out in less than two years with nearly all the good planned features. Then, Longhorn became his NT5. Everybody in the organization had massive planned super-features that weren't fully baked in the ideas phase. The org got sidetracked by Springboard and Trainyard rollouts for XP. They had a massive brain drain getting rid of FTEs below level 88 and told long term contractors to take a hike. The employees that were left had their institutional knowledge too diluted and strung out trying to teach new H1B and college hires while managing Chinese and Indian outsource firms doing half the work.

So what do you get? Vista. Valentine is no dummie. He pushed aside other execs that were wallowing in development hell projects. Now he was the one in development hell. He arranged his own exit on his terms. Good for him.

Sinofsky will get a Vista replacement out by 2009 and it'll be a clean-up release that makes a lot of people happy. Lots of stuff cut from Vista will get back in, done right. He'll get a big feature release out by 2011. After that you won't see another major Windows release until 2015.

There is no executive no matter how talented who's absence would create a problem this large. The senior suit leaves and all of a sudden the minions of program managers and bit heads running the company's #1 product release all go insane on the same day?

Tell you what - HIS boss, whoever that is, as well as all the direct reports to that now gone suit should be fired w/o hesitation. Whether you like MS or hate them, this is textbook how not to develop and release a product so either someone's lying or, if this is really how MS functions then it speaks volumes for what's profoundly wrong with MS and why all their major releases are screwed up a little bit.

A few years ago, I became a Microsoft employee by way of acquisition (I don't work there anymore). Your second theory is correct: this event speaks volumes about the way MS functions and how their corporate culture contributes to their products. I'm sure the story is no lie, but I don't think it's the case that he left and everyone just went nuts and shoved Vista out the door ready or not. Vista was way behind schedule and had lost highly touted features such as WinFS along the way. My opinion of the whole situation is that decision makers had come to the conclusion that "We're way past when we planned to ship, way over budget, have shed major promised features of Longhorn, and people are starting to use Vista and Duke Nuke'em Forever in the same sentence. We've got to get something out the door."

And that's about what happened. They got something out the door. IMO they got it out the door a little too soon, but there weren't going to be any more features added, it had been in beta a long time, and the holiday season was coming up. The calendar told them they had to release in time for that.

After all that, it was a bit of a flop anyway. Sales were (and are) quite non-stellar. This goes back to (mostly) the lack of compelling features (these were the ones shed just to be able to ship something), combined with the confusing license soup. The lowest-end versions of Vista, in particular, offer nothing compelling over XP. In fact, a user of XP Pro - or probably even XP Home - would find things that were missing from Vista Home Basic and have to go out and spend to get that functionality again.

And now we see Microsoft making something of a public embarrassment of itself on the world stage, fighting its battle with Yahoo in the press. If you're considering a proxy fight to initiate a hostile takeover, you don't talk about it in the newspapers. You communicate that privately to the Yahoo board, and if they again tell you where to shove it, you just taking action. You don't slug it out in the newspapers like a Brittany Spears saga.

If there was any serious doubt that Microsoft has jumped the shark, I think Vista dispelled it handily.

That doesn't mean Microsoft is not still a formidable player. They've got tons of money, some profitable product lines, and plenty of smart people working there. MSFT isn't going to disappear, and it's not going to go down without a fight. However, don't be surprised if it goes through some pretty radical re-orgs in the 3-7 year time frame. Particularly if MSFT gets what it's wishing for and buys Yahoo, there will be incredible challenges on The Road Ahead.

(Maybe that's a reason it took as long as it did to ship as well.) Besides, like you imply, there indeed was pressure to "release it already" since it had been in development so long. Possibly enough pressure that even a killer offer from Amazon didn't really speed things along much more, if at all.

People have very short memories. They see the fanfare and forget the 5 year death march.

I've seen this effect before. A manager in a company I worked for was angling for a position in a different business unit in the company. He wanted to show focus, leadership etc so he whitewashed the problems in the project he was directing and pushed for a premature release. He forced design choices that looked OK in the short term (from outside) and ignored the longterm consequences. He got the new job and a big write-up about how he had managed this project so well. Of course the project was flawed, but he did not have to clean up the mess anfd the product got canned a few months later.

Release decisions etc should not be made by exiting managers. They shopuld be made by the new management team that has to keep things going.

Release decisions etc should not be made by exiting managers. They shopuld be made by the new management team that has to keep things going.

Too fucking right! For a project as huge as Vista, I find it ludicrous that command, review, and oversight are all embodied by one individual. They're just taking his word for it?! This is one of those things I logically refuse to believe but have also come to expect in the business world.

If I knew a manager under me was looking to leave the company, I'd make sure his replacement was being trained and put in place long before the departure. How the hell can you expect any continuity in the process with people popping in and out? You can't run a fast food joint like that, let alone a major multi-billion dollar corporation.

I also would like to know what this guy does that's worth that kind of money. You'd almost thing it would have to be sexual.

Yes, you would expect a bit more oversight on such a critical project with such a huge budget.

Even if the manager does not jump ship, he might get killed in a plane crash etc.

The cool thing for a ship-jumping manager is that he gets away clean. Even if he leaves a mess behind he can always twist it: "Now that I've left, everything has fallen apart. Look at how good I am! Hand me another million share options".